"When we are young, our mornings are triumphant."
Then we wake up with a cool skin, a bright eye, and glossy hair.
When one grows older one wakes up in a very different state. Dull eyes, red, swollen cheeks, dry lips, the hair and beard all disarranged, impart an old, fatigued, wornout look to the face.
The Baron opened his traveling dressing-case, and made himself as tidy as he could, and then he waited.
The engine whistled and the train stopped, and his neighbor moved. No doubt he was awake. They started off again, and then an oblique ray of sun shone into the carriage just on to the sleeper, who moved again, shook himself, and then calmly showed his face.
It was a young, fair, pretty, stout woman, and the Baron looked at her in amazement. He did not know what to believe. He could really have sworn that it was—his wife, but wonderfully changed for the better: stouter—why she had grown as stout as he was—only it suited her much better than it did him.
She looked at him quietly, did not seem to recognize him, and then slowly laid aside her wraps. She had that calm assurance of a woman who is sure of herself, the insolent audacity of a first awakening, knowing and feeling that she was in her full beauty and freshness.
The Baron really lost his head. Was it his wife, or somebody else who was as like her as any sister could be? As he had not seen her for six years he might be mistaken.
She yawned, and he knew her by her gesture, and she turned and looked at him again, calmly, indifferently, as if she scarcely saw him, and then looked out at the country again.
He was upset and dreadfully perplexed, and waited, looking at her sideways, steadfastly.